Ecosystem lifecycle
How work opens, closes, ships and branches across all of GitHub — derived from issue, pull-request, release and branch events rather than from commit volume.
Recent volumes measure the archive, not GitHub. Every panel here is built from non-push events, and GH Archive's capture of those fell to 1–3% of historic rates between March and August 2026 — the same collapse Data health documents. Counts for 2023–2025 are sound; 2026 counts are not a measure of GitHub activity. The ratios below hold up better, because a collapse in capture pulls both sides down together.
Issue backlog: opened against closed
9,518,182 opened and 3,890,260 closed over 1 year (13 months) — 0.41 closed for every one opened. A ratio below 1 means the open backlog grows.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-10-01 to 2026-10-01. Opened: 9,518,182 total, peak 2,248,436 in a day. Closed: 3,890,260 total, peak 495,777 in a day.
- Opened
- Closed
Pull request throughput
23,887,175 opened, 3,145,849 closed. Merged and rejected cannot be separated — GH Archive does not populate the pull request state on these events, so a close is a close either way.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-10-01 to 2026-10-01. Opened: 23,887,175 total, peak 3,182,595 in a day. Closed: 3,145,849 total, peak 1,241,140 in a day.
- Opened
- Closed
Release cadence
Published releases per month over 1 year. Tags are cut far more often than releases are published — see branch and tag creation below.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-10-01 to 2026-10-01. Releases: 4,164,705 total, peak 580,753 in a day.
- Releases
Branch churn
94,563,820 branches created and 32,340,550 deleted over 1 year. Branch creation is the one CreateEvent stream the archive still carries at full volume, which makes it the most reliable series on this page.
Line chart, 13 months from 2025-10-01 to 2026-10-01. Created: 94,563,820 total, peak 10,561,034 in a day. Deleted: 32,340,550 total, peak 3,670,572 in a day.
- Created
- Deleted
Repository and tag creation stopped being recorded
GH Archive emitted 4.11M repository creations in September 2025, 1.04M in October, and none at all from November onward — while branch creation, above, continued unaffected. A clean stop on two ref_type values, four months before the gradual non-push decline began and unrelated to it. Nothing here is recoverable from the archive.
Line chart, 1 months from 2025-10-01 to 2025-10-01. Repositories: 1,042,665 total, peak 1,042,665 in a day. Tags: 216,433 total, peak 216,433 in a day.
- Repositories
- Tags
What the ecosystem is labelling
Most-used issue and pull-request labels in 2026-10-01. Repositories matters more than uses: one busy project can invent a label and out-post everyone, so a label spread across many repositories is the one that reflects shared practice.
| Label | Uses | Repositories | Uses per repo |
|---|---|---|---|
| bug | 40.2K | 12.9K | 3.1 |
| enhancement | 36.1K | 14.6K | 2.5 |
| dependencies | 23.1K | 17.4K | 1.3 |
| javascript | 9.7K | 7.8K | 1.2 |
| ready-for-agent | 9.6K | 2.7K | 3.5 |
| documentation | 7.1K | 3.5K | 2.1 |
| P2 | 4.5K | 788 | 5.8 |
| feature | 3.9K | 1.3K | 3.1 |
| security | 3.6K | 1.6K | 2.3 |
| type:feature | 3.5K | 704 | 5.0 |
| needs-triage | 3.4K | 1K | 3.3 |
| good first issue | 3.1K | 1.4K | 2.3 |
| backend | 3K | 896 | 3.3 |
| P1 | 3K | 692 | 4.3 |
| frontend | 2.7K | 853 | 3.1 |
| help wanted | 2.7K | 989 | 2.7 |
| github_actions | 2.6K | 2.3K | 1.1 |
| type:bug | 2.6K | 479 | 5.4 |
| P3 | 2.3K | 403 | 5.8 |
| in-progress | 2.3K | 330 | 7.0 |
| task | 2.2K | 477 | 4.7 |
| approved | 2.2K | 530 | 4.1 |
| needs-review | 1.9K | 126 | 15.0 |
| priority:P1 | 1.8K | 335 | 5.4 |